8 Quotes by Sylvia Nasar about mathematicians
- Author Sylvia Nasar
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Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an “optimization problem.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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The main interest of Fermat, who shares the credit for inventing calculus with Newton and analytic geometry with Descartes, was number theory —“the higher arithmetic.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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Other mathematical geniuses, Einstein and Bertrand Russell among them, recount similarly revelatory experiences in early adolescence.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were non-rational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists — Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan — Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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Steenrod was a careful, methodical man who chose his suits and sports coats according to a mathematical formula and had a mania for thinking up highly logical, if impractical, solutions to social problems like crime.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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There is no sign of a mathematical pedigree in Nash’s ancestry or any indication that mathematics was much in the air at the Nash household.
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- Author Sylvia Nasar
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RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an 'optimization problem'.
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